Metro53 - Is this NYC’s top model? Joe Macken has spent the last 21 years erecting a complex 3D design of New York City by hand - using nothing but balsa wood, Elmer’s glue and of course creativity.
The finished product, unveiled recently in a viral TikTok video, features nearly a million buildings spanning all five boroughs — including Staten Island, and even parts of New Jersey, Westchester and Long Island.
“It was quite the process. I just kept building and building and building,” truck driver Macken, 63, told The Post of his sprawling pet project. “I never thought in a million years I would ever get done with the whole, entire thing.”
At 30 feet wide and 50 feet long, the diorama is so gargantuan that he keeps it in a storage unit near his house in Clifton Park, about 20 miles north of Albany.
“Every minute of spare time that I have, I just dedicate to doing that, and it just added up over the years,” said Macken.
“If you’re flying over Central Park and then you look [at] mine, it looks exactly the same,” the creator said.
Macken’s magnum opus has caught fire online, with TikTok viewers calling the 3D cartographer a “living legend” and imploring NYC cultural institutions to showcase his Big Apple tribute in an exhibit.
Among the more than 12,000 comments — one labeled his work “insanely impressive” — YouTube even weighed in from its official TikTok account, writing, “A million buildings!? A museum needs to display this asap.”
“I knew it was my thing when I was doing it because, well, I was never into carpentry or anything like that,” Macken confessed to The Post. “But I was into skylines.”
“I got better at it and more experienced, and I found faster ways to build it,” said Macken, shown in one of his social media posts.
Macken said recreating Manhattan was especially difficult as he had to customize each skyscraper from scratch.
After completing Manhattan in 2016, the model citizen then moved on to the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and finally Staten Island.